One Nail At A Time
by Ayezur
Summary: This is how you change a life.


**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

**A/Ns: Apparently VinxTi has ET MY BRAIN, because it won't stay out of things. This is a bit odd... it's got a delicious VinxTi sauce, but the bulk of it is about Vincent and Yuffie. It is, however, not a Yuffentine. If this _offends_ you, I would suggest having a fit of the vapors _elsewhere_, as I have not the bloody patience to deal with your lot. If, however, you possess the emotional restraint of an incontinent _wombat_, go shit all over my LJ, not my review page, please. Link is in my profile. That is all, soldiers!**

**This entire thing was written in my head during a Habitat for Humanity build. I BET YOU CAN'T TELL AT ALL. **

* * *

_This is how something begins_

"Vincent! You were there! Why couldn't you save her? "

He doesn't meet her eyes when he apologizes, all dull inevitability that doesn't bother hurting anymore. She sees him anyway under his shield of black and red and pales at the resignation there, her mind reeling at what her mouth just said.

"No… I – I didn't mean to…" and then she lets it trail away because she _did_ mean to, because this was _Vincent, _Tall Dark and Spooky, unreadable and unflappable and stronger than any of them, who never let anyone die if he could help it. Who'd had to be tranquilized and chained to keep him down when they'd dragged Tifa to the gas chamber. Silence hangs heavy and dull between them; she welcomes it when Shelke comes in all cold eyes and monotone, welcomes the target and a chance to lance her rage. She meets his eyes when he restrains her and realizes that she could never hope to hurt him more than he hurts himself: however many ways she might find to blame him, he'd find a dozen more.

In the adrenaline-fueled hours that follow she doesn't have time to think back and realize how it's changed her understanding of him. It's not until he comes down from the mountains that she notices how her heart doesn't race anymore when she's near him. Her blood doesn't rise and flood her face, she doesn't find herself trembling and nervously wisecracking to hold him off. She doesn't feel anything except a faint relief that he's alive – who does he think he is, making them worry like that? – and it doesn't seem worth it to be upset that he greets her last.

_You lay a plan, you buy the materials, you find the land and you start to build._

It's months later in the future, a different country and a different world and she's building houses with the WRO when he sidles back into her life, asking to help. He's traded his claw for a single long sleeve and glove and it suits him – changed in some ways and in others just the same – even if Cloud did it first.

She finds his endless capacity for self-loathing is almost grating now, doesn't make her half-swoon at the romance of it, and in an effort to jostle him out of one of his blacker moods (over a failed doughnut run for all she knew, and wouldn't put it past him) she flicks paint from her brush onto his hair.

He touches the back of his head, stunned, and stares at the eggshell-white paint on his fingers. She sticks out her tongue at him and turns back to the wall, balancing one-footed just because she can.

A glob of paint, expertly flicked by the greatest gunman the world may ever see, lands right on the back of her neck.

When the others come back from lunch they find them lying prone and giggling, lopsided-dizzy from paint fumes and catharsis and weakly trying to hit each other with long-dried paint off barely-used brushes.

_There's no telling, at this stage, just what it will grow to be; all you have is a skeleton, a best-case scenario._

Something loosens in him now and he walks straighter than he ever did before, smiling slightly when he thinks no one's watching. He hasn't worn the cloak for a while now, and when he shows up on site in jeans and a ragged shirt dug up god-knows where, all he says is that it's gotten too hot for leather. There's a supervisor with long dark hair and wide, pretty brown eyes, all business and cheerful dedication who flirts with him a little; he starts flirting back and won't speak to Yuffie for a week when she points out the obvious.

It's nearly months of coaxing before he comes out with her on one of their rare days off and she drags him to a club, because why do things by halves? He tries to lurk in the shadows and she forces sickly-sweet colored drinks on him until he orders a properly manly drink just to make her stop: three drinks later she's discovered he can breakdance and emails the video to everyone on her contacts list. Lots of things seem like a good idea after five drinks, especially more drinks, and she isn't really surprised when she wakes up the next morning with a splitting headache in another woman's underwear. Vincent cringes as the mention of lamps or spatulas for weeks afterward.

_It goes up slowly, setbacks and lessons everywhere you turn, bleeding calluses and straining, exhausted muscles._

His father was a scientist and his mother was an art historian and they never knew what to make of their slim, clever son who loved the artifacts of war more than academia. He'd joined the Turks because his father had joined ShinRa, back before it had all gone wrong and the old man had always been a decent moral guide.

Her mother was dead and her father was broken and she'd grown up in the whispers and shadows of desecrated traditions. She'd trained with more energy than was a strictly proper and swore to restore Wutai to its former glory at first for the sake of seeing her father's smile and then, later, out of sheer bloody-mindedness as a mind raised to grand melodrama and half-remembered chivalry ran up against realities of the world.

He'd drifted through his life without thinking too hard, floating on charm and talent until he'd met _her_ and everything had gone to hell.

She'd left home early and turned thief out of desperation, a spoilt little princess out in the big world. Then she'd discovered materia, and dreamed of finally going home.

He'd woken up with nightmares clinging like cobwebs and hoped to set things right.

She'd been trounced, thoroughly, and needing an adventure.

He teaches her pool and a dozen ways to cheat at poker; she drags him to Wutai to learn tea ceremony and flower arrangement. He makes her memorize the specs of a dozen different guns, treating them with the same care as if they'd been living things, and she burdens him with the whole history of her family and her country, speaking as though it had all been only yesterday.

She rolls her eyes when he contrives the most fantastic excuses to linger around Seventh Heaven and threatens to spill the beans if he doesn't stiffen his sinews and _do_ it. He finds endless reasons to abandon her with any one of the dozen young men in the WRO he knows _damn_ well have silly, idealistic crushes on her, calling it payback.

It's a strange, lumbering friendship from the surface, because he never really stops lurking silently in corners (but she helps people past his defenses now, and he's never truly _alone_ anymore) and she'll always have more energy than sense (but he's made her start to look before she leaps, to leave things unsaid and play-act just a little) and it_works_, for both of them.

So she's absolutely horrified when he hugs her one day and she goes weak in the knees.

_When it takes its final shape it's already old, worn from a thousand working hands, memory and meaning etched in every board and tile and stone._

It's an overdose of exuberance on his part, because he'd asked Tifa, finally, and she'd said yes, Yuffie, _she said yes!_ She stiffens and he lets her go, thinking he's grabbed her too tight, and she brushes off his concern to demand details while a sick little thorn digs into her heart.

He takes Tifa out, and despite his nerves and fumbles and stuttering failures at explaining just how much it means she agrees to a second time, and a third, and a fourth, and then it's every Friday night, and then they've moved in together, and then everything shatters – a stupid argument about Cloud, jealous and foolish and hurt and words that can't be taken back. He's choking the story out to her over a whiskey sour and she can't think of anything to say while that nasty little worm squiggles up from where she'd locked it out of sight.

They wake up in the same bed, last night's drinks coating their tongues, and she lets him wallow in his disoriented panic for a moment, curious as to what he'll think of it. She can read him like a book after all these years: confusion, horror, and then a sudden sense of loss, because what if Tifa can't forgive me? What if I lose her – lose them both? What if what now what then?

She'd never stood a chance after all, not set against the first hand that ever reached out to him in hell, before they'd known there was man under all that false skin.

But he cares enough to be moved to horror at the thought of losing her friendship over a drunken mistake.

It's enough.

She spares him the loss of any more years of his life by pointing out that they're both still _clothed_, dingbat. And he goes back, and Tifa forgives him (there was nothing to forgive, but he insists because some habits merely go to sleep), and she watches from the sidelines and stands up at their wedding, trading silly faces with Cid standing at his side.

_This is how you build something._

The first and last and most dances in between he saves for his bride, but he spares one or two for her (she's known ballroom dancing from the cradle and had her toes squashed more than once trying to teach him). He thanks her, quietly, and she asks why?

For the dance, he says, and binge drinking and loud music and paint in my hair. Because none of this would have happened without you.

Then someone taps his shoulder and asks, hesitant, if he may cut in?

Vincent surrenders a little too hastily and she glares at him as the young WRO solider clumsily leads her around the floor. She can tell by the set of his shoulder and the look on Tifa's face that he's laughing as he walks away and knows the bastard planned this. The poor guy's practically shaking and she speaks with him, hoping to put him at ease.

It turns out he's from Wutai, and terrified of stepping on the princess' toes; not one of her little harem. That's enough to keep her going, and she learns that he didn't really want to come, that he hates ceremony and joined the WRO because he'd been too young to fight ShinRa, and that he loves bean sprouts (so does she) and studies martial arts and likes a drink or two now and again.

He's always admired her dedication and her courage, he tells her, turning bright red. She's surprised when her pulse flutters a bit as he talks about what an example she is – but not really, because she _knows_ Vincent now, and the damn spook of a man has one of the biggest hearts she's ever seen. It's when he stops himself midramble, saying that he sounds like a damn fanboy and asking her opinion on the latest round of ShinRa reparations that she goes a little lightheaded and figures she should have expected Vin'd want to spread his joy around.

_One nail at a time_.


End file.
